The Money Train: A Rails “E-Commerce Recipes” book. The Money Train is a great book being written by Benjamin Curtis about building e-commerce sites using Ruby on Rails. It's released as a 'beta book' meaning you can buy and read it in PDF form straight away, but over time you'll get tons of free updates [...]

Jobs Boards: A shotgun or a rifle?. The problem with huge job boards like Monster or the aggregation that Arrington envisions: There are too many ads. It’s a shotgun approach. If you want to hire just anyone, that will work. But if you want to hire the right person then you’ll need to do something [...]

Cooper's office phone concept.  Who likes their office phone? [no one raises their hands] Cooper believes they have the answer and have put their money where their concept is. Well, at least it appears they have a UI concept that’s built out. The UI is scroll wheel, touch screen, and voice recognition based. The interface [...]

No safer today. A very interesting interview with Michael Scheuer who, until he resigned in 2004, was a 22-year veteran with the CIA, he answers six questions: We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Is the country safer or more vulnerable to terrorism? Is Al Qaeda stronger or weaker than it [...]

Engineers Doubt Big Easy Levees. After nearly a year of work on the levee system in the Crescent City, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers admits it's likely not up to holding against a big one. [Wired News: Top Stories]

Commuter rail head steps down under fire. The head of the consortium that runs the MBTA's commuter rail system has resigned under withering criticism about late trains and chronic poor service, which worsened after the Big Dig tunnel closings sent more commuters to trains. [Boston Globe -- Front Page]

Skype Call Traced. Kobi Alexander fled the United States ten days ago. He was tracked down in Sri Lanka via a Skype call: According to the report, Alexander was located after making a one-minute call via the online telephone Skype service. The call, made from the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, alerted intelligence agencies to his [...]

Eric Sink is a marketing genius!. I’m downloading IE 7, RC1 and while I’m doing that I’m reading some blogs. Translation: avoiding answering email. I hate email. I hate email. I hate email. This morning Maryam and I got up to speak to marketing executives from a bunch of big companies (as big as Microsoft). [...]

Feel the pain…. Dare wrote a post talking about the advisability of making developers do operations. Which is really part of a philosophical question… When you're setting up a software organization, how much specialization should you have, and where you should you draw the lines around the responsibilities of the various groups? Some orgs take [...]

There's got to be a way to do this…. Here's what I want to be able to do. We've got a ton of books in the Fog Creek library, in no particular order, and it's gotten to the point where it's actually easier to order a new copy of a book from Amazon than to [...]